The Apache Software FoundationBlogging in Action.

Apache Isis

On Sept 25th and 26th we (Jeroen van der Wal & Dan Haywood) took part in the Original RAD Race competition. This is a competition staged each year, this year (as in previous years) hosted and sponsored by Cap Gemini, and held in their offices in Utrecht, Netherlands.

The competition consists of teams of exactly two team members; there were eight in total. The competition is held under very strict conditions: 8 hours of development on the first day, and a further 4 hours of coding the next. If you do the maths you’ll work out that means a sum total of 24 hours (2 team members x 12 hours), or 3 person-days.

We asked and were granted permission to develop our application as open source; our entry is in a github repo. If you look through the commit history you’ll see that all the work was done in those 12 hours (8 on 25 Sept 2015, a further 4 on 26 Sept).
All the other teams used proprietary tools such as NoutBuilder, ThinkWise, Progress, SalesForce, Uniface and Mendix. We were the only open source entry, using Apache Isis (along with supporting modules in Isis Addons); in fact we think we are the first open source entry in the 17 years history of the competition.

OK, we didn’t win…​ but we got the impression we were mid-table, which we think is pretty good in the face of the competition. But you can judge for yourself; either download and build the code, or simply take a look at the various screenshots/our commentary on the README of the repo.

The README also has some of our "learnings" that we concluded from taking part in the competition.